More Details Emerge on Lou Reed and Metallica Collaboration

Why is Lou Reed's name first? What's a Lulu?

Lou Reed and Metallica’s strange collaboration has been done on the
stealth from the moment they decided to work together.

If it weren’t for some savvy waitresses in the San Francisco Bay area who spotted them dining en masse we would have never suspected that they knew each other, let alone were working together. Since the metal legends made the news public on their website last June, they’re spoon-feeding us little bits of information a week at a time.

Their latest post on the newly created joint web site revealed a few choice details, like the new album has a name. Dubbed Lulu, not after the most excellent of San Francisco restaurant, but for the
psycho-sexual-political Lulu Plays, written by German playwright Frank
Wedekind, that captures the absurdity and sensationalism of German at the end
of the century.

That’s the end of the 1800s, if you’re interested. To sum up Wedekind for the uninitiated, he’s the one who famously said: “Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.” That is not meant as an editorial comment on this project. But then of course you’ll get your own chance to assess for yourself, when the ten songs they recorded together at Metallica’s HQ studio in Marin County are released on November 1 in the U.S., and on October 31 in the rest of the world.

Jaan Uhelszki was one of the founding editors at Detroit’s legendary Creem magazine. Since that time, her work has appeared in USA Today, Uncut, Rolling Stone, Spin, NME, Relix, and Guitar World. She is the only journalist to have ever performed in full makeup with Kiss. Luckily she only had to put…